No More Anything

Chapter Two: The Town

Woodbend, South Carolina had always been too small a town for Lucille Jensen. She's been stuck there her whole life, surrounded by gun-toting rednecks with unnecessarily loud trucks that had the most ridiculous looking lift kits on them. For Lucille, this town was a living nightmare. There was one of everything; one grocery store, one church, one gas station, one movie theater, et cetera. The town was founded sometime in the 1700's, and had been owned and occupied by the same families since then. It was the kind of town where everybody knew everybody, so if one person did anything, then everyone knew about it in a matter of minutes. Most of the residents of Woodbend were elderly people, and everyone knows how they like to gossip about anything and everyone.

Every time Lucile went anywhere, there were people that she knew on every street corner. It was a five minute drive to the grocery store from her house, and she'd see Mr. Eskew sweeping the sidewalk in front of his barber shop. She'd see Mr. and Mrs. Patterson changing the letters on the sign of their church to another bible verse. She'd see the Ellis twins outside playing with a ball while their dad sits on the porch, smoking a cigarette shirtless. Then, Lucille would finally get to the store and see plenty of other familiar faces, all of which would greet her by name and ask about various parts of her life, loading their gossip cannons with more ammunition. She was aware of this, however, and tried to be as vague as possible with her answers. Especially when Mrs. Bannister was around.

Delores Bannister was a "cranky old bitch," as Lucille tended to call her. She had lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one ... and she was still alive and kicking. Her face was dried out and wrinkled because of all the cigarettes she'd been smoking over the years, and her voice was deep and scratchy to match. She was the kind of woman to complain about literally anything. She'd order sweet tea at a restaurant, and it wouldn't be sweet enough. She'd buy a new car, the seats weren't squishy enough. She'd watch TV, the news stations wouldn't cover her favorite topics enough. Nothing was ever enough for that woman, and Lucille hated her for it. She'd briefly worked as a waitress at the one diner that Woodbend has, and she'd tell anyone that that was the worse experience of her life. Mostly because of Mrs. Bannister. Every time she'd come in for a meal, there was always something wrong. Her burger wasn't thick enough, her fries didn't have enough salt on them, or maybe her water had one less ice cube in it than she'd like. Either way, Lucille hated this woman with a passion. She'd always call her "Lucy," which she also hated.

In her mind, "Lucy" had always sounded dainty and feminine, which she absolutely was not, by any means. She had always been a tomboy growing up. As a kid, she'd usually go after the Hot Wheels and plastic dinosaurs rather than the Barbies and baby dolls. When she got older, it was the same story. She'd much rather play outside catching frogs in the mud than ... do whatever it is most "normal" girls do. Her dad, John, had been a firefighter Lucille's whole life, and that's exactly what she wanted to be when she got older. Most of her "friends" from school, if you could even call them that, had dreams of becoming fashion designers or "influencers" on social media. Not Lucille. She wanted to follow exactly in her dad's footsteps. After leaving her job as a waitress, she tried out for firefighting, but was turned down multiple times, due to the fire department being owned and operated by sexist old men.

"If it was up to me," her dad had said after her having been rejected for the fourth time "I'd have letcha join the first time you ever tried out. You're strong, and you can run fast. You'd be perfect for the job." Like everyone else in her family, he had a very strong southern accent, something Lucille had somehow never picked up.

"It's not that I'm not strong, it's that I'm..." Her voice trailed off as she tried to find yet another reason to accuse them of being sexist.

Her mom's voice chimed in after a second. "That you're five foot two with a cute, high pitched voice?" She chuckled at her own little joke, which Lucille didn't find very funny. Martha, her mother, had always been kind of a smartass. Always making jokes and poking fun at Lucille, something her dad did often as well. They both had the tendency to make jokes to diffuse situations that called for any kind of emotion, simply because they didn't know how to handle them.